Saturday, July 13, 2013

Peugeot Heaven Montbeliard

Montbeliard is the home of the Peugeot family. The company's lion emblem is actually derived from heraldic shield for the Comte region, so it comes as no surprise that here, apart from employing a number of thousands of people in its factories, it has a museum dedicated to its history.

Museums are places which hold old things, usually in Europe the newest of these things are very old indeed, and unlike the folk museums in Australia, one does not normally find oneself staring at an object that is presently in use in ones' garage, or a kitchen implement that is exactly the same as the one that was taken in the last box to St Vinnies. Understandably, given the relatively short history of the company, this museum had much of that very sort of thing on display; familiar tools and objects that had very much been in use in our lifetime.

There were of course more than a century's worth of cars and while those from the thirties may not have been familiar, and they were nothing less than art, but it was the more prosaic, those from the sixties and seventies that had our hearts racing just a teensy bit. We cannot be sure that it was the sight of the cars that we or our friends had once owned that so captured our emotions, as we remembered their various characteristics which seemed at the time to elevate them in our eyes to a state of being beyond that of mere machinery, or whether it was simply memories of the good times that we experienced in the eras in which we owned them.

Like the surfers' panelvans, they were part of our culture in that time, as were our accessories. More than one of our friends used to smoke Cigaret Galoises and we could never believe it was for the taste of the things. To this day I remain unconvinced that Ian and Cheryl didn't move to Toowoomba just so they could use the yellow headlights in proper fog.

We can't turn back time of course, but perhaps on reflection had we fed the children something less French than chocolate eclairs before descending the range, we may have been able to do without the airsickness bags in the seat pockets of the 505.

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Fading memories

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